The past decade has been marked by a technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. The effect has, in turn, driven technologies that have been known and available but relatively quiescent over the years. A major one of these technologies is the Internet or Web related distribution of documents. The Web or Internet, which had quietly existed for over a generation as a loose academic and government data distribution facility, reached “critical mass” and commenced a period of phenomenal expansion. With this expansion, businesses and consumers have direct access to all matter of documents and media through the Web.
The availability of extensive distribution channels has made it possible to keep all necessary parties in business, government and public organizations completely informed of all transactions that they need to know about at almost nominal costs through conventional electronic mail.
Among the many and varied industry efforts to focus the user's attention on the mail and mail sources most significant to a user from among the many available to him has been instant messaging. In an instant messaging system, a user may log in at any individual display terminal on a network and join a select group of other users logged in at other like display terminals to form a set of users at terminals that are, in effect, interconnected at server levels in networks for communications. International Business Machines Corporation's Lotus Sametime product line is an example of such an instant messaging system, as is proprietary Instant Messaging (IM) available from America Online, Inc. (AOL) or Microsoft's MSN business organizations. The selected set of participants in any instant messaging network are people with special common, but often limited, interests, e.g. a group of close friends, a family, business partners, a business team, a group of sports or game players, an education study group. The purpose of such an instant messaging team or group is real-time textual conversations within the group.
In such instant messaging systems, the chat room is the focus. In such a chat room implementation, there is displayed on each display screen of each of the participants the same chronological scrollable sequence of instant messages from each participant who has chosen to send a message. Thus, everyone who is logged on to the chat room gets the same chronological display screen, i.e. whatever the sender sends, all chat room participants get. This presents a problem for any participant who wishes to address only one or more of the chat room participants. For example, in a business meeting chat room, one of the participants may wish to make an aside to a set of only one or more of the participants who are in the same business team. In a family chat room, a subset of two or three may wish talk about some family gossip out of view of the rest of the group. In the past, the sender of such ancillary information had to set up a separate instant message that he could send to his selected participants outside of the chat room. This was very awkward, inconvenient and required continual switching between chat rooms and the outside instant messaging.